This Christmas will be particularly poignant for Tom Hanks and his wife Rita Wilson. In December last year, they were reeling from the news that Rita had been diagnosed with cancer – and in April, the 59-year-old confirmed she had undergone a double mastectomy and reconstructive surgery. Thankfully Rita is now cancer-free, and no-one is more in awe of her bravery these past 12 months than her proud husband Tom. "What has been so amazing about it is how powerfully it played out in a relatively short period of time," the Oscar-winner told the Daily Mail. "We all know by now what hell that sort of health crisis is. It just comes along out of the blue and everything else stops because the only thing to do is to drop everything else and pay attention to myriad stuff that needs to be attended to.
"Rita found out last December. That meant Christmas and New Year was a completely different version of how it had been on any year before, and now here we are a year later and she seems to be out of it. "Rita and I are lucky because we can afford the best healthcare in the world, we knew that blessing right off, but while it was happening, all I could do was bow down before the courage of my wife."He continued: "One thing I have noticed through this is that there are people out there in the world who, when they find out you have a certain illness, particularly cancer, they will immediately try to make money off you.
"They do this by pushing some procedures that might have a degree of science to them that might make them accurate, and some others that are complete quackery. Like anything from saying, 'Go to some clinic in Bolivia and they'll cure you', or 'Just go on a diet of peach stones', or something crazy. "These people are just trying to make money from the illness and they only add to the difficulty of what is already going on because they're dealing in false hopes. It is astounding the amount of that that goes on. They're predators."But God bless my wife – and her courage. We're very lucky."